Mission Impossible: Deploying Pivotal Cloud Foundry to Nine Air Operational Sites in a Year

The Air Operations Center (AOC) commands and controls all planning and execution of air missions for the United State Air Force (USAF). What started as a `pathfinder` in July 2017 in partnership with Defense Experimental Innovation Unit (DIUx), National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and Pivotal to try out a new approach of continuously delivering modern software to the most active operational theater in the Middle East has now turned into a fully concentrated effort for the AOC to fundamentally change the way software is built, tested, secured and fielded to its missions users across all seven primary operational theaters. The focus of this talk will be the platform journey that the AOC program in the Air Force is taking with Pivotal, undergoing cultural and organizational transformation to rapidly field Pivotal Cloud Foundry to all of its primary operational sites in one year by end of 2018. We want to share how the AOC program is taking a lean, startup approach to global platform delivery with iterative hypothesis testing and small feedback loops built to reduce risk and increase our ability to execute expeditiously. For example, we want to share how we triumphed in delivering platform to our pacific operational theater in just 150 days! Past efforts of fielding software systems that require similar magnitude of effort have taken 3 to 5 years. Cloud-native platform and applications are proving how software in the US Air Force can bring the competitive edge against our adversaries. We want to share our lessons learned along the way, so other programs in the Air Force as well as sister defense agencies who are looking to go on a similar journey can learn from our experiences. Attendees to the conference should be interested in the execution of our overall approach of how we achieve what seemed impossible within a historically bureaucratic organization in the US government. The AOC pathfinder has gained traction and visibility from very senior government decision makers in the Department of Defense who now seek how other defense programs can replicate our success by partnering with Pivotal and bringing cloud-native platform & applications and lean methodology to meet their own mission needs of today and tomorrow.
SpeakersL
Lt. Davis Gunter
Chief of Platform Ops, United States Air Force
Darryl Smith
Site Reliability Engineer , United States Air Force